Shopify Removed Its Hateful Content Policy; Now Ye Is Selling Swatiska Shirts

Rapper Kanye West, known as Ye, sold swastika shirts on a site hosted by Shopify Inc. during the Super Bowl, according to Bloomberg. During the NFL championship, West ran a commercial on Sunday night instructing viewers to “go to yeezy.com.”

Days before this, the rapper had praised Hitler and posted antisemitic content on his now-deactivated X account.

Hate speech on Shopify

On Monday, West’s website featured one item for sale: a white shirt with a black Nazi swastika in its center, listed under the product name HH-01. The site’s source code and privacy policy reveal Shopify hosts it.

Shopify relaxed its Acceptable Use Policy last year. The policy still states that users can’t do anything illegal when conducting business. However, the company appears to have removed a section prohibiting “hateful content” in July 2024.

In November 2024, Bloomberg reported that Shopify, a Canadian-based company, also hosts a store that sells Holocaust denial products. Additionally, executives wrote in support of free speech and recently expressed worries about rising antisemitism.

Tech companies loosening their moderation policies

Shopify isn’t the only company loosening its moderation policies. In January, Meta announced that it was ending its fact-checking system in favor of a community notes model similar to the system on X.

Contributing users will review the community notes model by adding context to posts across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. The move aims to ease WhatsApp’s content policies by removing limitations on topics like gender and immigration while prioritizing reviewing illegal and high-severity violations.

In the same month, Google told the EU that it would not add fact-checks to search results and YouTube videos or apply them in positioning or removing content, even though it is an obligation of a new EU law, as stated in a copy of a letter reviewed by Axios.

Google has not incorporated fact-checking as part of its content moderation practices, and it does not plan to change its actions.

Update: February 11, 2025. Kanye West’s online store is now unavailable.

Image: Invision/Evan Agostini